Case History Of A Wikipedia Page: Nabokov's 'Lolita'

Wikipedia has an article on almost every subject—including, it
turns out, one on how to write “the
perfect Wikipedia article.” The guidelines run through a list
of the attributes such an article would have—e.g., “[i]s precise
and explicit,” “[i]s well-documented,” “[i]s engaging”—before
ending on a cautionary note: The perfect Wikipedia article is, by
virtue of the collaborative editing process that creates it, “not
attainable”: “Editing may bring an article closer to perfection,
but ultimately, perfection means
different things to different editors.” And as editors pursue
perfection, they also must keep in mind another essential quality
of a good Wikipedia entry: neutrality.
That is, no matter how controversial a topic, an article must
present “competing views on controversies logically and fairly, and
pointing out all sides without favoring particular viewpoints.”

As a member of the Arbitration
Committee, Ira Matetsky settles the kinds of editorial disputes
that
controversial articles tend to incite. In a series of
thoughtful guest posts on The Volokh Conspiracy, Matetsky
explained some of the mechanics behind the editorial process. He
noted that, generally, while “articles on non-contentious topics
are usually accurate; articles on highly contentious articles are
usually accurate on basic facts, but can be subject to bias and
dispute with respect to the matters in controversy.” As a way of
investigating Matetsky’s point (and with Wikipedia
editathons making news (sub. req.)), we thought we’d chart the
history of a single Wiki entry by using that nifty “View History”
button. And what’s a page that’s constantly being edited, has as
its subject a work of art with an, ahem, unconventional sense of
morality, and is therefore constantly subjected to the editing
whims of people with strong opinions, moral or otherwise? She goes
by many names, but on my greasy MacBook Pro screen, she is always
“Lolita.”

In the past ten years, the entry has grown from the
four-sentence description, shown above, to the detailed,
6,000-plus-word monolith of today. The two Lolita films now
have their ownpages, while
the entry on the novel has expanded to include sections on such
subjects as Lolita‘s Russian
translation and its
literary allusions. An edit is made, on average, about every
other day.

A sift through those 2,303 edits turns up three reasons that
users alter the Lolita Wikipedia page: technicalities, new
information and debate.

TECHNICALITIES AND MINUTIAE
Par for the course for any article. These details matter to
nitpickers, without whom Wikipedia wouldn’t be nearly as
reliable.

NEW INFORMATION
Updated information on other classics may be scarce, but
Lolita‘s provenance has been in the news in recent years. In
March 2004, German professor Michael Maar’s discovered of a 1916
short story by Heinz von Lichberg, also called “Lolita” and
containing a very similar plot to Nabokov’s version. The news of
Maar’s discovery did not appear on the page until May 2004.

After Maar’s book
came out in October 2005, the idea of “cryptomnesia,” that
is, “when a forgotten memory returns without it being recognized as
such by the subject, who believes it is something new and
original,” was added as a possible reason for the similarities
between Nabokov’s and von Lichberg’s respective “Lolitas.”

Jonathan Lethem’s February 2007 Harper’s article called
“The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” briefly mentions Maar’s
discovery, which may account for the Lolita page’s highest number
of views in January of the same year.

DEBATE
Here’s where the arguments start, and where the tenet of neutrality
gets challenged. Over the years, editors have disagreed over what
terms to use to describe Humbert Humbert, Lolita and the
relationship between them. After all, how do you transform
sentences such as this into neutral prose?: “There my beauty lay
down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide
open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the
bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her
tense narrow nates, clothed in black, and the seaside of her
schoolgirl thighs.”

On calling Humbert Humbert a “pedophile”:

On “pedophile” vs. “(h)ephebophile,” and
distinguishing the two. These edits went back and forth over the
course of December 14-17, 2009:

On whether to judge him for it:

On whether the nature of their relationship makes Humbert
Humbert a reliable narrator or not:

One of the most consistent debates is over the use of
“pre-pubescent” versus “pubescent” in describing Lolita’s age.

Note: Merriam-Webster defines puberty as “the condition
of being or the period of becoming first capable of reproducing
sexually marked by maturing of the genital organs, development of
secondary sex characteristics, and in the human and in higher
primates by the first occurrence of menstruation in the female.”
Or, as Humbert Humbert himself reports: “The median age of
pubescence for girls has been found to be thirteen years and nine
months in New York and Chicago. The age varies for individuals from
ten, or earlier, to seventeen.”

This isn’t Humbert’s first circling of the topic. Earlier in the
novel he says:

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens
who… I propose to designate as “nymphets. It will be marked that I
substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the
reader see “nine” and “fourteen” as the boundaries—the mirrory
beaches and rosy rocks—of an enchanted island haunted by those
nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.

Dude’s a pedophile. A poetic one.

On Lolita’s name, and whether to call her a “heroine” or
not.

The constant back-and-forth over word choice is just a microcosm
of the same (albeit slightly less charged) issue of relaying the
plot. This revision from January 2007 changes “rhapsodize over
Lolita in her sleep” to “sexually molest Lolita without fear of
discovery.”

Entries such as the one on Lolita demonstrate why perfection
on Wikipedia remains an “unattainable” goal—when the topic is
contentious, perfection will always butt heads against “is
completely neutral and unbiased.” One man’s undeniable literary
masterpiece is another man’s abominable pedophilic trash, and
they’re both editors on Wikipedia. The edits to the Lolita
page (and any Wikipedia page) can seem tedious and petty, and many
of them are. But the users’ vigilance in keeping some words and
changing others, and debating over content and style, does have a
purpose: it keeps critical thinking alive and well. The writing,
editing, rewriting and re-editing process of a Wikipedia page
creates a new entity—the Lolita Wikipedia page, which is not
Nabokov’s Lolita, but a work in its own right. In the
collaborative editing process, any reader can use the Lolita
page to challenge its meaning. In fact, he can reach right in and
edit it himself, until someone else edits it again.